Orthopathy: Three Genealogies, Five Uses

It may surprise readers, especially Catholic theologians, that the neologism “orthopathy” originates not with Jon Sobrino but with Theodore Runyon (1930–2017). ^{Footnote 2} Runyon recognized the challenge that appealing to the category of “religious experience” poses to theological reflection, for when appealing to religious experience, what prevents one from sliding into subjectivism? ^{Footnote 3}

Inspired by John Wesley, Runyon sought a mode of theological reflection that took appeals to religious experience seriously. “The knowledge of God,” Runyon writes, “is not just believing the right things (orthodoxy), or doing the right things (orthopraxy), but involves the experience of the reality of God that is the product, not of the subjective imagination, but of the divine Spirit.” ^{Footnote 4} Theology requires more than assenting or doing. It involves being affected by and transformed through an encounter with God’s grace. So, Runyon asks, “Just as orthodoxy sets guidelines and standards for right doctrine, and orthopraxy sets standards for right practices, is there a need for an ‘orthopathy’ (right feelings, affections, and in the larger sense experience) that can offer norms and guidelines for right religious experience?” ^{Footnote 5}

Runyon answers this question by proposing six criteria. Orthopathic experience 1) must transcend subjectivism by giving priority to the world external to the self, 2) be transformative, 3) recognize the social and shared character of experience, 4) be rational, 5) be sacramental, and 6) be teleological. ^{Footnote 6} Orthopathy, for Runyon, “makes its contribution to ecumenical theology by adding the religious experience dimension to orthodoxy and orthopraxy. It puts orthodoxy in the context of a living faith relation, and orthopraxy in the context of a synergy in which the Holy Spirit is the co-producer of our activity.” ^{Footnote 7} With his category and evaluative criteria, Runyon found a way for theologians to attend to religious experience and the affections within an integrated vision of theological anthropology. At no point, however, does he directly address the nature of the emotions or the role they play in religious experience. Moreover, despite authoring the neologism, Runyon’s influence seems limited to Wesleyan and Pentecostal circles. None of the authors considered below attribute their use of orthopathy to Runyon but to Jon Sobrino. ^{Footnote 8}

With Sobrino’s La fe en Jesucristo: Ensayo desde las victimas, orthopathy was introduced to a wide theological audience. ^{Footnote 9} The gospel, for Sobrino, is “Good News” in three ways. First, what Jesus announces and enacts—the kingdom of God—is orthopraxis. Second, what Jesus accomplishes through his death and resurrection—the kerygma—is assented to in faith as orthodoxy. Third (yet too often neglected), Jesus’s “manner of being in his service to the Kingdom of God, and in his relationship to the Father” is also good news. ^{Footnote 10} In Jesus, believers encounter and confess the one who reveals the “good news of what is truly human.” ^{Footnote 11} As Sobrino uses it, orthopathy describes “the correct way of letting ourselves be affected by the reality of Christ.” ^{Footnote 12} Because encounter with Jesus is at once cognitive and affective, believers cannot content themselves with theorizing about Jesus but must consider how Jesus’s way of being, “his closeness, honesty, tenderness toward the weak,” ^{Footnote 13} must guide the transformation of their lives. The question of orthopathy is not limited to a cognitive “What do you know about Christ?” but interrogates, at an existential level, “How has knowing Christ affected your heart and reformed your life?” How does undergoing an encounter with Christ form and transform how one interacts with the world? How is the disciple’s life different for having been correctly touched by a graced encounter?

Now, it must be said that Sobrino does not envision the orthopathic response as requiring one to slavishly reenact Jesus’s life. He maintains, instead, that those whose hearts have been affected by an encounter with Christ will live a life that bears a “fundamental isomorphism” with Jesus’s. ^{Footnote 14} Orthopathy addresses the way conversion, or metanoia, inspires disciples to adopt Jesus’s disposition toward others. Whereas orthodoxy describes what one believes and orthopraxis what one does, orthopathy speaks to how one’s being affected by Christ flows into and manifests itself in Christianity’s “right belief” and “right action.” Nevertheless, like Runyon, Sobrino neglects to account for the role the emotions play within orthopathy. This lacuna is also present in authors who have recently sought to appropriate and apply Sobrino’s category to contemporary issues. The reason for engaging Annie Selak, Glen Butner, and Edward Vacek below is that they provide three attempts to theologically explicate and apply the concept of orthopathy. What binds them, in addition to their stated intent, is a common neglect to provide an account of what emotions are or how they contribute to orthopathy.

Annie Selak directly engages Sobrino’s understanding of orthodoxy, orthopraxis, and orthopathy to evaluate recent contributions to the feminist kenosis debate. ^{Footnote 15} At issue is the way theologians have used the idea of kenosis, or self-emptying, to oppress women. Such misuses reflect a sinister and often patriarchal logic: Jesus suffered and died on the Cross; can you expect any less? Be like Christ and do not refuse your cup: abuse, oppression, neglect. Take courage and, inspired by Jesus’s self-emptying, drink the cup’s bitter gall. Such a summons to self-abasement must be negated. Thus, and rightly, Selak assays to articulate an understanding of kenosis that has been purged of its potentially abusive ballast. Rightly repristinated, Selak envisions kenosis as becoming “a vital component of feminist spirituality.” ^{Footnote 16}

Selak rightly insists that an orthopathically developed theology will look to the emotional impact theology has on women. Ideas and practices that empower women are to be lifted up and celebrated; practices that denigrate or diminish women must be abandoned. ^{Footnote 17} Yet Selak never advances beyond Sobrino’s description of orthopathy as the correct way of being affected by Christ, nor does she offer a developed account of the way orthopathy can be used to address and assess the emotional impact of theology on women’s beliefs and practices. Ironically, in an essay intended to argue for the importance of orthopathy, no substantive account of the emotions is offered. Although Selak justifiably wants a space within theology for the emotions, her reliance on Sobrino’s definition impedes this effort because Sobrino does not offer a fleshed-out account of the emotions. While Selak’s essay records a necessary intervention signaling the need for theologians to pay heed to the role emotions play in theological reflection and in the life of faith, more work remains to be done.

Glenn Butner offers a second approach. Judging Sobrino’s categories, especially orthopathy, as essential for stimulating conversation between theologians and economists, Butner, like Selak, accepts Sobrino’s basic definition of orthopathy but extends it in a new way:

Butner rightly distinguishes orthopathy from orthodoxy (abstract, cognitional) and orthopraxis (concrete, dynamic), but like Selak and Sobrino, he neglects to offer an account of the emotions. As a result, his use of orthopathy lacks conceptual clarity. Indeed, Butner’s description of orthopathy is surprisingly abstract and cognitional. Can one intentionally “adopt a pre-reflective” orientation? A little later, he describes orthopathy as “pre-reflective or pre-intentional,” yet this seems hard to square with Sobrino’s definition. ^{Footnote 19} If orthopathy is the right way of being affected by Christ, and if orthopathy animates orthodoxy and orthopraxis, can one legitimately relegate it to a pre-intentional status? Although he attributes his use of orthopathy to Sobrino, Butner’s description seems more indebted to Charles Taylor’s “social imaginary.” ^{Footnote 20} Regardless, Butner’s justified insistence on foregrounding the importance of the affections glaringly omits any direct discussion of the affections. Sobrino’s silence on this topic, it seems, enshrouds those who borrow from him.

A third take on orthopathy comes from Edward Vacek. ^{Footnote 21} Vacek’s treatment advances beyond those of Sobrino, Selak, and Butner, as he does provide a more developed and nuanced account of the affections and their importance to theological reflection. He directs attention to the way “our affections ground and give significance to our intellectual and volitional activity” ^{Footnote 22} and insists that any theology that disregards the emotions cannot be adequate. What makes Vacek’s essay hard to position is that he claims orthopathy as his neologism: “As is obvious, I am inventing a new word.” ^{Footnote 23}

Of interest here is Vacek’s engagement with philosophical, sociological, and psychological research. These sources permit him to construct a larger framework for reflecting theologically on the emotions. His concern is the way emotions contribute to, or derogate from, an embrace of orthodoxy. Emotions, Vacek observes, reveal values. Citing the Catechism of the Catholic Church (§1771), he agrees that they are the way one “intuits the good and suspects evil.” ^{Footnote 24} Emotions are neither “locked inside my head” nor reducible to bodily perturbations but are, instead, cognitive evaluations of a world encountered as value-saturated: “the corollary is that without our emotions, we would not experience the world as valuable.” ^{Footnote 25} For Vacek, we do not interact with a world that is neutrally there but comport ourselves within a world charged with value. Emotions forge connections between us and the world. We are affected by what is other to us; we move toward or away from what we evaluate as good or evil. These movements establish ties between us and the world. Love, Paul wrote to the Corinthians, transforms how we perceive; without love, knowledge about the mysteries of God is meaningless (1 Cor 13:2). Vacek, unconsciously aligning with Runyon and Sobrino, recognizes, that to be credible, orthodoxy and orthopraxis must be rooted in a love-quickened or orthopathic heart. Nevertheless, Vacek, too, leaves underdeveloped his account of just what emotions are.

Orthopathy: one category with three distinct genealogies. Although all five theologians insist on incorporating the affections into theological reflection, none of them develops an account of what emotions are or how they serve as bearers of cognitive content. To fill in these gaps, I propose returning to the work of American psychologist William James. James provided an early, influential, and, as we shall see, much misunderstood account of the emotions. Recent efforts by several psychologists and neuroscientists have, however, begun to vindicate James’s original insights into the emotions. ^{Footnote 26} William James understood the intimate relationship between perception and affection or, closer to our terms, between aesthesis and pathos. Although other theorists of emotion could be engaged, I focus on James because his works, with some finesse, highlight the relationship between perception and affection. James not only contributes content to our understanding of orthopathy, but he also builds a bridge to our discussion of orthoaesthesis.

William James on Emotion

William James’s 1884 “What Is an Emotion?” attempted to overthrow a dominant view of emotions and replace it with his own. He sets up the contrasting viewpoints:

We commonly think of emotions as mental events. One experiences a stimulus, evaluates it, and the resulting judgment produces an emotion that leads to bodily changes. Emotions, in this account, eventuate in bodily action. To schematize the sequence: Perception (Monster Under Bed) ◊ Emotion (Fear) ◊ Bodily Response (Heart Rate) ◊ Action. James contests this order. He believed that the body’s physical responses play an essential role in the constitution of emotions. And most of us who have been taught James’s theory, or the so-called James-Lange theory of emotions, found it rendered in this manner: Perception (Monster Under Bed) ◊ Bodily Response (Heart Rate) ◊ Emotion (Fear). Psychologist Phoebe Ellsworth, however, contests this schematization because it oversimplifies James’s point. James did not believe that emotions are nothing more than the experience of bodily changes. This schema ignores how, for James, “the sense of the bodily changes provides the emotionality to what would otherwise be a neutral perception or interpretation of the situation. Bodily experiences are not the whole experience; they are the part that makes the whole experience emotional.” ^{Footnote 28} James understood well the psychophysical nature of emotions and the way perception and emotion intermediate with one another. In what follows, I will draw on Ellsworth and Lisa Feldman Barrett to propose a third schema for understanding the emotions. James, I suggest, offers a much more sophisticated and illuminating account of the emotions than we have been led to believe.

Let us revisit James’s distinction between the commonsense view and his. Common sense, he writes, says:

James rejects the common sense sequence (perception à emotion à bodily response) because he cannot envision a “purely disembodied emotion.” ^{Footnote 30} For James, as for Destutt de Tracy (1754–1836), there can be no experience of emotion without some change in bodily sensation. ^{Footnote 31} In the wake of his wife’s death, C. S. Lewis captures vividly the body’s role in experiencing emotion: “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.” ^{Footnote 32} The body is not, for James, passively interposed between perception and emotion but actively contributes to how one is affected by and emotionally responds to what one perceives.

James’s insight into the body’s contribution to the emotions never gained traction. W. L. Worcester lampoons James by seizing on the bear:

Worcester, Ellsworth argues, oversimplifies James’s account. Were Worcester correct in his portrayal, James would be a proto-behaviorist whose account of the emotions would amount to little more than a stimulus-response model. Worcester believes that, for James, any perception of a bear must necessarily result in the emotion of fear. See the bear, feel fear. Of course, as Worcester’s counterexample demonstrates, this is patently absurd: surely, there is no “universal” response to the “bear” because the context in which the bear is perceived shapes how one responds. Thus, what we commonly regard as the James-Lange theory of emotion (Perception ◊ Bodily Response ◊ Emotion) is indeed incredible and untenable.

As Ellsworth observes, scholars have generally accepted Worcester’s portrayal of James’s position, despite James’s own efforts to clarify his position in a subsequent essay. ^{Footnote 34} Citing James’s own examples—losing a fortune and being insulted—she pushes back against conventional portrayals of James’s theory. For James, emotions are not bereft of cognitive content. The Dow Jones plummeting or a colleague’s insult elicits an affective response because each is cognitively interpreted. As the Dow plummets, my physical weeping manifests sorrow that my fortune has evaporated; looking at my smug colleague, making my hand into a fist, and getting “hot under the collar” manifests anger. Thus, Ellsworth observes, “there is no question that when James used the term perception, he meant more than simple sensation; he meant cognitive appraisal.” ^{Footnote 35} Emotions are not passively provoked but rather produced through a combination of physical and cognitive responses to one’s world. James’s account of the emotions, I argue, is thicker and more nuanced than that found in textbooks.

In 1894, James attempted to respond to critics, but it was too little, too late. In “The Physical Basis of Emotion,” he explicitly foregrounds the role of context and cognitive interpretation: “Objects are certainly the primitive arousers of instinctive reflex movement. But they take their place, as experience goes on, as elements in total ‘situations,’ the other suggestions of which may prompt to movements of an entirely different sort.” ^{Footnote 36} We are not, on this account, passive slaves to instinct. Nor, for that matter, should we expect the same stimulus to evoke identical responses either from the same person or across a range of persons (as though emotions were universally preprogrammed responses to stimuli). Why? Because each person’s emotions reflect a unique synthesis of physiological and cognitive inputs. What one perceives cannot but be shaped by one’s experiences and expectations. Every sensory manifold—an object’s size, shape, sound, color, distance, attributes—is bodily perceived and cognitively evaluated. No percept—whether bear or insult or falling stock—moves straight into the nervous system (stimulus-response) but must pass through an interpretive schema. Emotional responses, Lisa Feldman Barrett observes, are the “brain’s creation of what your bodily sensations mean, in relation to what is going on around you in the world.” ^{Footnote 37} Emotions are an embodied judgment that reflects the way the subject’s perceptions are conditioned 1) within one’s total context, 2) in light of one’s past experiences, 3) with an orientation to future action, that 4) reflects the agent’s cognitive appraisal of and readiness to respond to the situation. An example: there is no contextless “caress” of the cheek. In the arms of my beloved, I submit to the loving touch. The same gentle stroke, on a crowded bus filled with strangers, elicits from me a significantly different appraisal and an energetic response to flee. Whether amorousness or terror, each emotion registers the meaning of a perception contextually received and cognitively appraised.

Barrett argues that what is taught as the James-Lange theory is, in fact, the creation of John Dewey. ^{Footnote 38} Ironically, James’s effort to counteract behaviorist or “essentialist” understandings of the emotion was subverted by Dewey, thereby attributing to him a theory he did not hold. But James did not think there was a universal “essence” or “biological fingerprint” for fear or anger or joy. James believed “each instance of emotion, not each category of emotion, comes from a unique bodily state…. It means you can tremble in fear, jump in fear, freeze in fear, scream in fear, gasp in fear, hide in fear, attack in fear, and even laugh in the face of fear. Each occurrence of fear is associated with a different set of internal changes or sensations.” ^{Footnote 39} Fear, like all emotions, is context-dependent and its tonalities and expressions reflect the perceiver’s past experiences and present cognitive appraisal of the situation; these past experiences and present appraisals incline the subject toward future action. Moreover, there is not a univocal or universal emotion known as “fear.” As James observed, one must learn to discern “how almost infinitely numerous and subtle” the emotions may be. ^{Footnote 40} One learns to discern the flow of and variations within emotions, Barret writes, by acquiring and becoming increasingly fluent in using emotional concepts. ^{Footnote 41} We grow as discerners of emotion—others’ as well as our own—by experiencing, reflecting, and learning to detect “functional resemblances” or analogies with other subjects’ experiences. ^{Footnote 42}

Before suggesting James’s contributions to orthopathy, allow me to posit a third schematization of his theory that shows the relationship between aesthesis and pathos:

Figure 1.

Emotions arise within and reflect the subject’s total situation. Physical perception (through the senses) and cognitive appraisal (interpretation) intermediate and are synthesized as the emotion. The emotion is not “just a feeling” but is a whole-body judgment that is informed by experience and prepares one for action. Nor is this unidirectional: emotions feed back into and contour how we perceive and interpret other sensations. What and how we feel colors and influences what and how we perceive our world. Thus, the task of growing as “feelers” requires one to learn to discern, with ever finer distinctions, how well or poorly we understand our emotions and the emotions of others.

First published in 1946 as “Essai sur la notion de lecture,” Simone Weil’s “Essay on the Notion of Reading” aligns with James’s understanding of the emotions. The world, for Weil, imposes itself on the subject and this requires that the subject engage in a process of interpretation and discernment to grasp the meaning of an encounter. Interactions with the world do not bear labels such as “fear” or “peaceful” but require assessment and evaluation. As with James, then, emotions reflect the embodied judgment of the subject’s appraisal of a situation. Emotions, for Weil, are responsive: “It is incorrect to say that we believe that we are in danger because we are afraid,” she writes with an allusion evocative of James. “On the contrary, one is afraid by virtue of the presence of danger; it is the danger that scares us; but danger is something I read.” ^{Footnote 43} For Weil, the world seizes us and forces us to “read” and interpret its meaning. All sensations are bearers of meaning and value. The young lover who receives a note from his beloved swoons not from handling the paper but because of the meaning disclosed from within its fold. There is nothing inherently terrifying about the sound of glass shattering, but a sound that might not raise an eyebrow when one breaks a glass while doing dishes elicits a rather different response when heard in the middle of the night. For Weil, like James, the way we read and interpret the meanings of events is open to refinement and requires discernment. Our responses to the world are not preconditioned but can, with effort, be changed. As we shall consider, one way of effecting such change and refining how one perceives and responds can be achieved through practices of negative effort.

Let me suggest that James makes two contributions to the category of orthopathy, categories needed to fill in the gaps noted in earlier accounts. First, he foregrounds the intimate relationship between bodily perception and the emotions. There is, as Runyon did appreciate, an empirical basis for orthopathy. John Locke, who influenced John Wesley and Runyon, observed that all cognition begins with sensation. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding he writes, “There appear not to be any ideas in the mind before the senses have conveyed any in.” ^{Footnote 44} This echoes a scholastic axiom found in Thomas Aquinas’s De veritate: Praeterea, nihil in intellectu nisi prius in sensu (Therefore, there is nothing in the intellect that is not first in the senses). ^{Footnote 45} Thanks to James, we can add that there is nothing in the intellect or in the affect that was not first in the senses (nihil est in intellectu vel affectu nisi prius fuerit in sensu). By refusing to reduce affect only to a sense experience, James regards the body and mind as contributing to the emotions. The picture that emerges is one where emotions are not passive but anticipatory. The psychophysical subject does not simply react to the world but, based on prior experiences and future expectations, is oriented by the emotions to future action. A subject’s shifting emotions reflect the embodied subject’s interaction with and interpretation of the world. These encounters are colored by the subject’s prior experiences and serve to shape the agent’s future action. Thus, emotions are not isolable or isolated mental events but embodied judgments of the subject’s perception of the world. They may be more or less accurate, but emotions register a claim about reality and the ways the world impinges upon and affects the subject. They are interpretations that arise from, as Weil noted, “reading” our world.

Second, affections are personal but not private. To avoid subjectivism, orthopathy acknowledges that emotions are psychophysical appraisals 1) of a shared world 2) using socially shared concepts. Emotions of “anger” or “joy” or “sorrow” are not evolutionarily preprogrammed responses, each one being manifested in a uniform manner. With her “theory of constructed emotions,” Barrett argues that socially or culturally mediated conceptual categories make it possible to identify what one is experiencing. Yet concepts of “anger” or “joy” or “sorrow” both identify the emotion and provide the cultural script for how those emotions are expressed. What makes one angry and how one responds “in anger” play out and are intelligible within a cultural-linguistic nexus, ^{Footnote 46} so we learn the word “anger” and the many ways it can be expressed by interacting with and watching others. Interactions with others provides the language and the cultural expectations for how one emotionally responds. We are, in effect, emotionally formed and, at times, even deformed by exemplars. Growth in orthopathy does not require feeling one emotion but, instead, requires developing finesse in discerning how one’s affective response to any stimuli fits and makes sense within one’s cultural context. Over time and with experience, one learns to discern what James called “functional resemblances” that deepen and nuance one’s sense of how emotions can be manifested within a spectrum of responses. ^{Footnote 47} So, although I do not have direct access to your experiences or affective life, I can learn to discern resemblances or analogies with my repertoire of emotion concepts that provide me with at least an inchoate and always culturally conditioned sense for what you might be going through. ^{Footnote 48}

The foregoing leads to a definition: Orthopathy reflects the subject’s cognitive appraisal of and embodied response to stimuli using concepts and categories drawn from one’s social context. One is rightly affected when one’s response is intelligible within a shared cultural framework, even if the response leads one to challenge or expand what is typically expected. Orthopathy, in short, is context-dependent and can be assessed only in relation to the shared social world one occupies. This does not mean that being “affected rightly” requires that the same stimulus will elicit an identical response from each member of a given culture. There exists a complex interplay between past experiences, future expectations, and culturally mediated concepts that shape one’s affective response. What makes “right affection” right is how well the subject interprets and evaluates the situation in a coherent manner. Even if we cannot do so in the heat of the moment, we can offer reasons for why we respond as we do. I grow enraged but, upon reflection and with discernment, realize my response is disproportionate to the target of my anger, so I acknowledge that I have misjudged the situation and apologize. At other times, I discern anger to be eminently appropriate to a rift I detect within my community. “Righteous anger” may, in this case, lead me to challenge my inherited cultural script as I denounce injustice and call for the situation’s redress, even if this makes others uncomfortable. But how does one discern whether one’s responses are appropriate? To complement and complete orthopathy, we need an account of orthoaesthesis.

Orthoaesthesis: Negative Effort’s Goal

If the word orthopathy was unfamiliar, orthoaesthesis must strike the ear as a barbarous neologism. Among philosophers and theologians, it has limited currency. As far as I can tell, it was introduced by Edmund Husserl in Ideas II but, apart from a few references to it elsewhere, has not been developed. ^{Footnote 49} Before explaining how I use it, let me locate it in Husserl’s text.

In Ideas II, Husserl examines the way the embodied subject relates to the world. For him, the body acts as “the medium of all perception; it is the organ of perception and is necessarily involved in all perception.” ^{Footnote 50} Under normal, or “orthoaesthetic,” conditions, we are seldom thematically conscious of the body’s role in perception. Unless something obtrudes, the body “disappears” into the background, thereby allowing us to enact our daily tasks. ^{Footnote 51} Within an orthoaesthetic system, one moves seamlessly because of the surrounding harmony. A seasoned chef, for instance, typically thinks little about wielding her knife. In a normal or orthoaesthetic system, her cutting flows naturally and without much focal awareness—until, that is, she burns her hand. The blistered flesh “feels” different, and this in two ways. Swollen and sore, the skin “feels” different from the unburned area. The chef runs another finger over the burn wound, winces, and tries to go back to work. Here, she discovers the second difference in feeling. The wound creates a breach within the system and forces her to renegotiate her practices. She becomes conscious of the body’s role in hitherto unnoticed engagements. Cutting is awkward, slicing labored, and she hopes the blister heals quickly so things return to their orthoaesthetic condition.

That, in broad strokes, is how Husserl understood orthoaesthesis. Orthoaesthesis describes how we perceive, function within, and interact with the world under normal circumstances. Yet it is often the case that we do not recognize our orthoaesthetic states until they are disrupted by some sort of breakdown. An interruption of “normalcy” brings to the fore what had been recessed and ignored. But—here I move in a new direction—what happens when a breakdown of “normalcy” turns out to be salutary? For example, imagine a music student who acquired a bad habit of holding his violin bow in a certain way. To him, it is “normal.” An experienced teacher would see it as an impediment and correct it. At first, the adjustment is awkward and the student resists, but as his playing improves, he embraces the change. What had been a breakdown becomes a breakthrough into an enhanced mode of musicianship. Increased musical range and better tone confirm the benefit. Indeed, he perceives the difference physically and aurally, growing attuned to subtleties in other musical performances that enable him to nuance his own playing. Growth as a musician requires developing orthoaesthesis, a mode of “right perception” that transforms how one listens to music. The violinist does not hear different melodies, but, as he becomes more discerning, he hears them differently, attuned to hitherto missed nuances. He grows orthoaesthetically.

In what follows, I describe orthoaesthesis as the skill and task needed to complement orthopathy. As a skill, it treats right perception as a way of beholding that allows reality to disclose itself on its terms. As a task, right perception demands self-critical discernment of ruptures within a “normal” system. This unfolds in two stages. First, I draw on Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch to establish the foundation of orthoaesthesis. Second, I try to shift orthoaesthesis into a theological key and show how it might contribute to theological method.

Now, neither Murdoch nor Weil ever invoke “orthoaesthesis.” Yet both would concur that cultivating the skill of right perception is a vital task. For Murdoch, “perception itself is a mode of evaluation.” ^{Footnote 52} She accents its moral significance when she claims that “the selfish self-interestedly casual or callous man sees a different world from that which the careful scrupulous benevolent just man sees.” ^{Footnote 53} What causes the difference in vision? It is, Murdoch writes, the self-insistent clamoring of the “fat relentless ego.” ^{Footnote 54} But what we find in Murdoch is not just a theory about perception but techniques to reorient and purify the egocentric gaze. The following passage gives Murdoch’s diagnosis and proposed treatment of egoism’s myopia:

This passage contains, in nuce, much of what I want to elaborate. I begin by discussing Murdoch’s sense of the obstacles to clear perception. Next, I consider Weil’s contribution to a new “vocabulary of attention” and the way Murdoch adopts and adapts Weil’s ideas. This leads to an analysis of the practices Murdoch enjoins to correct and clarify perception. Her exercises of attention or “negative effort” gradually reorient the egocentric gaze toward a reality outside of the self, a reality that is beheld justly and lovingly. Rather than telling readers what to perceive, Murdoch tutors them in how to perceive. Without growth in this purified mode of perception that Murdoch and Weil know as “attention,” growth in orthopathy is impossible.

Orthoaesthesis: Obstacles and Opportunities

In essays written in 1959, Murdoch identified “social convention and neurosis” as the enemies of the moral life. ^{Footnote 56} Convention submerges agents in a network of rules and expectations. To be good, here, entails “getting along” and demands little introspection or consideration of life’s difficulties. The neurotic, by contrast, stands apart from others. The neurotic is “enclosed in a fantasy” and incapable of recognizing realities beyond the self. ^{Footnote 57} The result, as Margaret Holland writes, is that both “contribute to a failure to perceive the obscure and complex nature of persons.” ^{Footnote 58} In “On ‘God’ and ‘Good,’ ” Murdoch revisits the neurotic and credits Freud for providing a “doctrine of original sin,” albeit one evacuated of supernatural content. Freud, she says, saw the “fallen” agent as “an egocentric system of quasi-mechanical energy, largely determined by its own individual history, whose natural attachments are sexual, ambiguous, and hard for the subject to understand or control. Introspection reveals only the deep tissue of ambivalent motive, and fantasy is a stronger force than reason.” ^{Footnote 59} No Edenic picture here! Beguiled by self-serving fantasy, the ego places itself at the center of reality. The reality of others is a threat, eliciting a hostility manifested in attempts to “derealise the other, devour and absorb him, subject him to the mechanism of our own fantasy.” ^{Footnote 60} Murdoch’s fat ego exercises itself in an anxious and self-assertive libido dominandi.

Yet the fallen subject is not without hope. Murdoch sees the task of moral philosophy as redirecting the ego’s “quasi-mechanical energy” away from the self, a redirection drawn and guided by the purifying pull of another energy. This involves embarking on a spiritual pilgrimage leading “from appearance to reality.” ^{Footnote 61} Fantasy enthralls us with false pictures; it woos with the sirens’ song and lulls one into a state where growth or conversion becomes unthinkable. The purified imagination, by contrast, is liberated from this enchantment. Freed from fantasy, the liberated imagination enables the subject to behold and engage rightly with the world. For Murdoch, the fantasy-free imagination “appears as a restoration of freedom, cognition, the effortful ability to see what lies before one more clearly, more justly, to consider new possibilities, and to respond to good attachments and desires which have been in eclipse.” ^{Footnote 62} Imagination turns toward a reality beyond the self, not to derealize it but to behold it. For Murdoch, this is love: “Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.” ^{Footnote 63} Hardly a private emotion, Murdoch’s understanding of love is a radical claim about how we relate to reality.

Egoistic fantasy impedes and blinds the subject’s clear perception. For Murdoch, the “relentless ego” imposes itself on what is other to the self and occludes the subject’s vision. Given its fantasy-fueled libido dominandi, how can one be freed to roam imagination’s expanses and perceive reality with a just and loving gaze? Unlike Baron Munchausen, one cannot save oneself from drowning in fantasy by pulling oneself up by the hair. One must grasp something beyond oneself or, perhaps for the theist, be grasped by something other than the self. Regardless, Murdoch acknowledges that liberation from egoism requires effort and persistence: “It is a task to come to see the world as it is.” ^{Footnote 64} If this is true, orthoaesthesis requires learning to recognize and receive what is other to ourselves. To appreciate this task and how Murdoch suggests achieving it, let us consider the liberating power of the Good before considering Weil’s contribution to Murdoch’s project.

Love, Murdoch claims, “is knowledge of the individual,” ^{Footnote 65} yet she admits that this knowledge is frustrated by the urge to derealize the other. But there are ways to subvert egoism. Evoking Plato’s cave, Murdoch frames human life as a spiritual journey, a redemptive ascent out of egoism’s darkness into a world illuminated by a Good beyond being. Neither an object nor an entity, Murdoch’s understanding of the Good bears a Platonic trace that depicts it as the transcendent “source of light” that enables one to see and evaluate rightly. ^{Footnote 66} Here, her cognitivist slip shows, for “Good” is not a label we simply subjectively affix to objects or actions; as G. E. Moore held, the Good is a real and knowable property. ^{Footnote 67} Good is not denominated by our whim but is, instead, an independent, transcendent, and nonobjectifiable reality by whose light we perceive rightly and know truly. Murdoch believes the solipsistic agent needs to be opened to and reoriented by the Good. Indeed, by its light we discover an idea of perfection that orients and magnetically draws our gaze. By this light, we can behold individual objects’ imperfections and imagine how they could be perfected. The idea of perfection renders every act of evaluation a moral act, for evaluation requires us to judge against a standard. But because we are naturally selfish, seeing what is other to us does not come easily. We must work at seeing clearly. To articulate these practices, Murdoch borrows from Weil the concept of “attention.”

Weil’s definition of attention is found in her “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies.”^{Footnote 68} She describes how the mistakes we make in our studies result from egoism. If we rush, if we “seize upon an idea too hastily,” then we close ourselves off from the truth.^{Footnote 69} Instead of allowing the object to set the method and guide our inquiry, we impose ourselves upon and try to wrest the answer from it. Attention, for Weil, is key because it subdues this egoism. Attention

Attention is an active passivity of the self who willingly undergoes a change enacted from outside of the self. Weil embraces paradox, regarding attention as “an effort, the greatest of all efforts perhaps, but it is a negative effort.”^{Footnote 71} Negative effort requires not an exercise of the will but its opposite: a relaxed openness to reality. For Weil, negative effort should not be enervating but enlivening because it brings us into contact with the real. We learn more, she holds, from twenty minutes of attention than from three hours of struggle. As a training for life, the negative effort exercised through studies prepares us to receive the truth, to welcome God, whenever and however revealed. Pure attention is the substance of prayer and puts us into communion with the world and, for Weil, with God. It assumes a stance of humility and “stands back” in openness to await the other’s self-disclosure. Negative effort quiets the clamoring ego and patiently awaits the advent of the other.

Numerous passages within Weil’s “Forms of the Implicit Love of God” leave little doubt that the French mystic exercised an enormous influence on Murdoch’s thought. I select but one passage to show how Weil’s insight into ego, fantasy, and love presage Murdoch’s work. We live, Weil writes, in a world of

Murdoch borrows from Weil’s vocabulary in at least two ways. First, she takes “attention” to express the idea of “a just and loving gaze directed at an individual.” ^{Footnote 73} By no means is attention voyeuristic, for the beholder is also beheld. Attention renders the subject vulnerable to reality and open to transformation. Murdoch calls this transformation wrought through contemplative attention “unselfing.” ^{Footnote 74} Despite the name, it does not mean self-destruction. Rather, it describes an ongoing process of becoming porous to reality. Unselfing, an active and deliberate process, does not require “renouncing the work of our minds on reality altogether.” ^{Footnote 75} If the “fat” ego turns in on the self, unselfing coaxes it open to perceive the world not by the light of fantasy but beneath the light of the Good. Unselfing makes it possible to see justly and lovingly. Attention transforms perception not by homing in on details but by being attuned to the full and irreducible reality of the other. The loving gaze resists efforts to derealize the other; it does not surrender to sentimental romanticism but insists on beholding the other as the other self-manifests. The practice of attention and the active cultivation of a just and loving gaze opens a two-way movement between self and other, allowing the other’s reality to penetrate and transform one’s own reality. To perceive the other rightly, bereft of fantasy’s lenses, may impel one to throw open one’s door in welcome; it may, conversely, embolden one to bar the door to one who threatens to betray love. For if the practiced loving gaze renders one a skilled discerner, it does not enjoin one to become a doormat.

As envisioned by Weil and Murdoch, negative effort involves two movements. Attention arrests the ego’s effort to derealize others and encourages one to become actively passive and receptive to reality. In this pose, the reality of the other may touch one’s very core, but the agent’s actively passive “being open” is simultaneously possible only because the agent is being opened by the Good or God. By this light, the opened subject beholds reality anew and is able “to see, and cherish and respect, what is not” oneself. ^{Footnote 76} Magnetically drawn by the Good, the agent “perceives the real world, a true and just seeing of people and human institutions, which is also a seeing of the invisible through the visible, the real through the apparent, the spiritual beyond the material.” ^{Footnote 77} Now, how Weil and Murdoch interpret this conversion differs. Weil sees “negative effort” as attuning us to creation as a sacrament. The world, for her, is a metaxu, or “between,” where the “essence of created things is to be intermediaries” leading to a transcendent God. ^{Footnote 78} Murdoch, who did not seem to have a belief in a personal God, takes a different approach. For her, the Good functions in a matter akin to Plato’s sun. As she reads Plato, the sun is “separate and perfect, yet also immanent in the world as the life-giving magnetic genesis of all our struggles for truth and virtue.” ^{Footnote 79} Justin Broackes describes Murdoch’s immanent and nonsupernatural Good as “realist and deflationary.” ^{Footnote 80} For Murdoch, Broackes contends, the Good does not hover in a far-off realm, but it is a real property by whose light the moral agent discovers “in lesser goods the shadow of higher degrees of goodness.” ^{Footnote 81} It conveys an idea of perfection, one that gives us a way to distinguish between the “better” and “worse.” Unlike Weil, for whom creation serves as a means to ascend toward the Creator, Murdoch’s Good does not offer a way to an other-worldly vision. It reveals, instead, the world’s texture and allows us to see the world otherwise, as charged or saturated with value. Nevertheless, despite this fundamental disagreement, Weil and Murdoch align in their belief that we can develop right perception. Let us look, then, at examples of how practices of “negative effort” encourage orthoaesthesis.

Contemplated attentively, experiences of beauty can change consciousness. Murdoch provides the following instance:

The kestrel interrupts anxious self-preoccupation by shifting her gaze from inner brooding to outward contemplation. Its inbreaking frees the subject from resentment, reinscribes her into the environment, and reintegrates the riven self; it “breaks the spell of this ego-driven oblivion.”^{Footnote 83} The kestrel’s arrival does not erase the past, but its ingress reorients her vision and makes it possible for her to regard and evaluate her hurts in a new manner. What had moments before constricted and choked her imagination is unclogged; she beholds these events against a new or, at least, a renewed horizon. Despite being a chance encounter and not the result of intentional practice, Murdoch concludes, “this is something which we may also do deliberately: give attention to nature in order to clear our minds of selfish care.”^{Footnote 84}

Murdoch recognizes that affection (anxious brooding) shapes perception (oblivious of surroundings) and its reversal through attention. The kestrel occasions unselfing, a process that does not reduce but renews. It pierces the self-enclosed subject, lifts the veil concealing reality, and enables her to perceive within a broader horizon. Past hurts are recontextualized; their control over her, lessened. The kestrel’s unexpected inbreaking marks a breakthrough into a new mode of openness to what is other. The sudden reorientation of perception is accompanied by a sudden transformation of her affections.

In addition to contemplating physical beauty—natural and artistic—Murdoch envisions other practices of negative effort. Instead of describing the study of Latin or Greek, as Weil did, Murdoch recounts learning Russian. This intellectual practice is no less an occasion for an unselfing, because learning a language requires facing

Attention’s double-movement operates as love’s gaze turns from the self toward a reality it cannot control. The learner must remain open and vulnerable to the language if progress is to be made. For learning demands practice, and though this practice may be perfective, one will never achieve total perfection: the goal of perfection is approached asymptotically. Through study, one grows adept, struggles, and strives, but one’s intellective reach exceeds its grasp. There is, contrary to the ego’s attempt to assert total mastery, always more to know.

Regardless of its object, attention makes communion with reality possible. Unselfing proceeds according to an exitus-reditus pattern. First, one turns away from the self and toward the reality of another (exitus). In this turning, one suppresses egoism by making a concerted effort to see reality on its terms, not the self’s. Then, one returns to the self to discover that one has changed, that one perceives and is now affected by reality differently (reditus). Entering communion with reality, while certainly informative, is also formative. The kestrel, a new language, even my beloved: attention may augment what one knows but, by occasioning growth in love’s gaze, love also transforms how one does so. The student’s humility before reality, inculcated through attention, translates into the expert’s humility whose commitment to the Good empowers her to abandon a pet theory when confronted with contrary evidence. Negative effort capacitates an obediential freedom; growth in “right perception” enables one to discern and pursue the Good more fully. Such discernment leads to the paradoxical realization that authentic freedom derives not from a proliferation of choices but through obedience to the Good.^{Footnote 86} Maturation in orthoaesthesis engenders an ever-greater fidelity to the real as apperceived according to the light of the Good. This maturation process, moreover, never ends, as the gaze can never exhaust the depths of what is perceived. Whereas a reductive gaze assays to “take the measure” of what is beheld, the orthoaesthetic gaze is drawn into the infinite depths of each being.

“I can only choose within a world I can see[,] in the moral sense of ‘see’ which implies that clear vision is a result of moral imagination and moral effort.”^{Footnote 87} In Murdoch’s Weil-inspired techniques, we find exercises aimed at clarifying vision. By loosening egoism’s grasp, practices of negative effort transform how we perceive, and are affected by, the real. This process of being liberated from the ego is never completed; it is an ongoing and lifelong task. Bridget Clarke asks whether we can test perception’s veracity. No, not if veracity means claiming dominion over “the Truth.” Yes, if we accept that as individuals and communities we can be “guided by the principle of the Good and the standard of perfection it entails.”^{Footnote 88} Our pilgrimage from fantasy to reality requires us to undertake a process of ongoing critique. For refining and purifying vision, discernment of social frameworks is no less vital than personal reflection. We grow as perceivers by checking our vision against our frameworks of understanding, by revisiting and rethinking our way of picturing the world, and by being open to modifying those frameworks and pictures. The world, Murdoch writes, is not “given to us ‘on a plate’ ” but as a creative task. Our ongoing task is to learn to see rightly, to see justly, and to see lovingly. The technique for overcoming our egoism is the negative effort of unselfing.^{Footnote 89}

Exercising negative effort is an endless task because cultivating a disciplined moral imagination involves recognizing that there is more than we can ever fully apprehend: there is always too much to take in all at once. The more we refine how we perceive reality, the better able we are to evaluate and respond to it. This leads me to posit the following: Orthoaesthesis, the fruit of negative effort, describes how the attentive beholder stands before reality in a way that is willingly vulnerable to knowing and being affected by what is other to the self. Right perception does not depend on the capacity to see with granular precision but, rather, to take in the whole of what is other on its own terms. The orthoaesthetic subject recognizes that what one perceives is always shaped and colored by one’s affective state, that past experiences and future expectations inform how one comports oneself and interacts with the world in the present. The orthoaesthetic state is not fixed but dynamic and requires critical dialogue with others to verify one’s perceptions, to evaluate one’s responses, and to grow more adept at discerning how better to be affected by and to respond to the world. Guided by the Good or, theologically, by God’s grace, one’s effort to see the individual with a just and loving gaze is rewarded with an ever-deepening knowledge of reality as it is and as it is coming to be. When combined with orthopathy, orthoaesthesis describes a dynamic way of interacting with and responding to one’s world. The two are ineluctably bound such that there can be no orthopathy without orthoaesthesis.